


Gifts of Great Value

by GretchenSinister



Series: My Top 3 Cavity Fics [3]
Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pirate, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-08
Updated: 2020-02-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:21:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22611694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Original Prompt: "I was listening to this version of Pirate Jenny: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFAg8x6AXQY and remembered that Pitch in the books pretty much started out as a space pirate. And I had the image of Tooth and Pitch together, with her scouting ahead, before sending one of her fairies to tell Pitch when it’s time to show up. And Pitch follows with his Fearlings, slaughtering anyone unlucky enough to be around (and taking the children to make more Fearlings, though perhaps they keep a human crew as well). And Tooth takes the teeth of specific people, like someone who she saw beat a girl, and anyone who has done something worse like rape or horrible muggings gets their heads cut off, for her to take the teeth later.Smut is optional, and prefered consensual"I read this prompt and basically just made a pirate AU (which got a little out of hand). Pitch made a bargain to become captain of the most feared ship on the waters of the world, but the price was too high. He’s looking for a way to break this bargain when he finds Tooth, involved in a bargain of her own. There may be a way for them to help each other, if Pitch is desperate enough to agree.
Relationships: Pitch Black/Toothiana
Series: My Top 3 Cavity Fics [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1626877
Kudos: 3
Collections: Cavity Short Fics





	Gifts of Great Value

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 9/19/2016.

“You!” Pitch laughs and shakes his head. “It’s been you the whole time! Taking the teeth, leaving those strange old coins. You know that people’ve been spinning wild tales on account of that. You have them looking under the bed for bogeys! It’s incredible, though I still can’t fathom what you want the teeth for. And whoever heard of a pirate giving away gold?”  
  
Tooth raises both eyebrows and one corner of her mouth as she looks at him from the mossy stone of her throne. “You are strangely confident for a man bound hand and foot and surrounded by at least a dozen guards he can see,” she says. “Especially since your ship is nowhere near this island.”  
  
He grins. “It’s because you give me so much credit. I’m sure you don’t treat other apparently marooned men with such state.”  
  
“Hm.” Tooth directs her attention to one of the young women pointing a cutlass at Pitch. “Bring him a few steps closer.” Tooth leans forward, and the heavy necklaces she wears, each made of hundreds of teeth, click with the movement. “I do not think we have each other’s true measure, yet,” she says carefully. “I have learned to tell the difference between true confidence and mere bluffing, in my time taking teeth. And I have learned other things on the sea. I think you have, as well, but…perhaps I have been believing too many wild tales.” Her eyes rake over Pitch. “But perhaps not. I look at you, in your rags, and it seems impossible that you should have managed to arrive here, or that you are the captain of the most feared ship in the Pacific. It seems impossible…as impossible as that golden locket that you’re hiding underneath the remains of your shirt.”  
  
Pitch pales, and Tooth smiles. Yet instead of asking him—or telling him—more about the locket at that moment, she leans back in her throne and spreads her arms. “Tell me, Pitch. When you look at me, here, what do you see?”  
  
What _does_ he see, really? He sees a small, brown-skinned woman wearing a dress not unlike the ones he’s seen women wearing in various English-controlled ports, save that the sleeves have been removed and the rest of it has been sewn with layer upon layer of feathers. He sees the massive necklaces of teeth draped over her chest. He sees the crumbling stone of the throne she sits upon and of the floor beneath it, of the pillars nearly entirely reclaimed by the island’s tropical forest. He sees that beyond the space immediately surrounding the throne, fallen chunks of roof are scattered haphazardly with ancient gold coins that shine as though dirt dares not touch them.  
  
He sees all this, and he thinks of the gold he’s seen shine like that before. He’d thought there could be nothing else like it in the world when he saw the locket shine like that. He couldn’t have walked away from something like that locket, like these coins. He recognized the allure for a warning, now, and far too late. “I see that you may be in debt that all this gold around you can’t repay. That’s curious. There’s enough gold here, I think, to repay any earthly debt seven times over.”  
  
“Ha!” Tooth leans forward again. “You reveal more about yourself than you see about me. You imply there is something here, something to which I have bartered my soul, and, oh no, what a terrible bargain I have made, whatever shall I do?” She scoffs. “I know exactly what kind of bargain I have made. Do you think that because I am a pirate, I am a simple plunderer like you? No! I searched for this place, through scraps of story and memory, for years, and I knew what would happen when I picked up one of the coins here.”  
  
“That’s what you don’t want me to do!” Pitch exclaims. “That’s why you’re keeping me bound like this.”  
  
“I have plans that I will allow no one to disturb,” Tooth says.  
  
“My god!” Pitch shakes his head. “It’s been years, now, with the teeth, and you still haven’t cottoned on to the truth that these bargains are always bad?”  
  
“I have only ‘cottoned on’ to the truth that most people that make such bargains are fools,” Tooth retorts. “As I am sure you are, now.”  
  
The locket presses, strangely cold and clammy as always, against his chest. “You know nothing! The price is always higher than you can pay! I am the captain of the most feared ship on any sea, a phantom ship with a phantom crew. I summon them with the locket, I control them with the locket, and behind all this is the power of my deepest fear!” His shoulders slump. “What a bargain. A fast ship, a strong crew, strength beyond telling in the shadows, and the assurance that one’s greatest fear will never come to pass, that it need never live inside one again.” He looks up and meets Tooth’s gaze. “Take a tooth from me if you must, march me back out into the ocean if you must, but I will never pick up one of those coins around you. I came to this island following rumor and hearsay, and I didn’t find what I was looking for. I don’t care what you’re doing here, and I’d just as soon not be a part of it. I only ask…”  
  
“You don’t want to die,” said Tooth. Her eyes narrow. “But it doesn’t seem like you would ask for the sake of the soul you perhaps fear you have lost.” She turns to her guards. “Keep his hands bound, but take him to my quarters.”  
  


* * *

  
  
“In penny novels that command leads to only one conclusion,” Pitch says wanly.  
  
“Were you waiting till I got here to say something like that? You don’t seem at all enthusiastic about it.” Tooth builds up a fire and starts heating water over it. Her quarters, as she calls them, are two neatly-built rooms set on stilts a few feet above the sandy soil on the verge between the forest and the beach. When he was marched to them, Pitch thought he could make out a few other buildings through the trees, but didn’t care enough to bother asking questions of people pointing swords at him.  
  
“It’s the teeth, no doubt, that put me off,” Pitch says, his voice even flatter.  
  
“That’s enough,” Tooth says. “That sort of banter is bad enough when one person is enjoying it; when neither person is it’s worse than a badly-acted play.”  
  
“I will swear on anything in the world that if you let me go I will say nothing of this island to anyone with ears to listen or mouth to speak.”  
  
Tooth unwraps a new block of compressed tea leaves and readies the teapot. “I would be willing to work with that if you were without your locket and I was without my teeth,” she says. “But there are things I want to know from you, and there are things I need to know from you. _Here_ , on this island, I think the bargain I have made is a good one. It is amusing to me to hear tales of men dealing with powers beyond their mastery in ways that leave them broken.”  
  
Pitch looks up and finds her expression tenser than he expected. Understanding hits him in a flash. She can’t speak freely on this island, which is no doubt inhabited by whatever power she bargained with. He nods.  
  
“I want to know your story, and in turn I shall give you mine,” she says. “You can lie, and I know you expect to escape when the sun goes down, but do not expect that the power of your locket trumps who and what I will be able to muster.”  
  
“I see no advantage for you in knowing the truth, so be assured, I will tell it,” Pitch says.  
  
Tooth smiles a little and pours two cups of tea. “You’ve become a desperate man since we last met,” she says quietly.  
  
“True.” Pitch inclines his head toward Tooth as he raises his tea with his bound hands.  
  
Tooth raises her cup back to him with a smirk. “A good start. Now, how did you find my island, and why were you searching for it?”  
  
“I followed rumors, as I said. These rumors were, in the main, stories of impossible, miraculous escapes that took place near these shores. There were other stories, too, of shy, feminine sprites inhabiting this location. That intrigued me, though not for any libidinous reason.” He shudders as he finishes speaking. “So,” he begins again, “I wasn’t searching for you. I didn’t know it was your island. I was searching for it because…” He takes a deep breath. “When I found the locket, I was offered strength, power over darkness, command of the most feared ship on all the waters of the world. The price seemed to be yet another advantage. I would no longer suffer my greatest fear, and the power in the locket would make sure that even encountering my greatest fear in this world would be impossible.”  
  
Tooth sets her elbows on the table and watches him closely. “Am I right to think,” she says, “that if your greatest fear had been spiders, you would have accounted the price easy, not given a damn about how a bargain like that affected your soul, and cheerfully become the richest man whose name was ever cursed by the British navy?”  
  
Pitch gives a small laugh. “No doubt,” he says. “Unfortunately for me, what I thought was my greatest fear was not. Things like spiders, heights, snakes, drowning—after I accepted the offer in the locket, I understood that for a grown person, the greatest fear is never anything like that.” He shrugs. “Maybe a particularly selfish child could use the locket entirely to their advantage. In my case, well. I thought I would be forever safe from crocodiles, and that the fear and loathing I once held for them would be projected into the hearts of the crews of my chosen prizes as soon as they saw my ship.”  
  
Tooth’s brow creases.  
  
“Now, you may have heard that some tars have gone mad with terror upon seeing my ship. That’s true. But I didn’t fear crocodiles nearly that much. I feared….Tooth, I have a daughter. And, as it turned out, my greatest fear was that something would harm her. When I accepted the locket’s power, I suddenly knew that. I knew that just as I knew she had been whisked out of this world to somewhere else. Where nothing could harm her, but where I cannot see her, or hear her voice, or hold her hands.”  
  
“I do not want to be cold,” Tooth says, “but did you confirm that she was gone?”  
  
“Yes,” Pitch says, staring down at the table. “The husband and wife who care for her when I am gone were frantic and terrified when I arrived, for it seemed Sarah had been taken from her room in the dead of night. I lied to them and told them I knew where she was, that this was a test of their loyalty. I’m not even sure that made sense.” He taps his knee with his bound hands. “I don’t want the locket’s power anymore. These powers, these bargains—at least a navy man will see that I’m a man as well when we’re aiming pistols at each other. But whatever is the true source of the powers in my locket…I know it doesn’t understand how humans feel, if the solution to my fears about my daughter was to spirit her away. Or, if it does understand, it’s spiteful. I want nothing to do with it anymore. I need to prove it a liar to break its power, and see my daughter and free her. So. That’s why I’m at this island. I thought there might be something strange here that aided escapes, or, that the island was out of the world enough to perhaps be the place where my daughter was.”  
  
Tooth curls her fingers around her teacup and studies Pitch. “We are enough in the world to not be your daughter’s hiding place,” she says carefully. “But you are not entirely wrong about the power that lives here.”  
  
Pitch looks up to meet her eyes, and she continues. “What I know of the story is this: The power on this island agreed to give certain abilities to the people that once lived here in exchange for gifts of great value. In the initial bargain, the gifts were not named. Also, in the original bargain, the power agreed to be bound until a certain number of gifts were received. At this point, the binding would break, and there would be eternal friendship between the power and the people. Well—and this is all legend, you understand. There was no one here to provide a history when I arrived. Well, the power was bound, even though it hated bindings of any sort, because it knew it was only temporary.  
  
“And then, the time came for the people to give their gifts of great value to the power. They brought it gold. And the power was furious. Of what value to it was gold? But the bargain had not been broken. And so the power seethed in anger as it guarded its golden gifts, and bided its time until the people had paid it the number of gifts required for it to be free. In its first rush of freedom after the final gold coin fell into its massive treasure chamber, the power reached out and destroyed every last person who dared to bind it and give it only dross. But when they were all gone, the power realized that the gold was so useless to it, it was not enough to free the power from its binding entirely, now that the power was the only one living who remembered the bargain. From its perspective, no gifts of great value had yet been given to it, and no matter how it raged, it could not leave the island. So it scattered the gold through the ruins of its fury, and made a bargain with that gold. Whatever mortal hand picked up a gold piece, that mortal would be responsible for providing a gift of great value in exchange. And whoever provided the last gift would truly free the power, and the power would become that mortal’s eternal ally, a blade to cut all bindings and break all chains.”  
  
“It values teeth more than gold?” Pitch leans back. “That certainly seems like a power to trust, especially after it destroyed a civilization.” Still, his eyes are thoughtful and Tooth sees this.  
  
“I am giving it what it wants,” Tooth says. “I am paying the exact price it demands.” She stands and begins to pace the length of the room. “I do not know why you became a pirate,” she says, “but I know why I became one. The life I could have lived otherwise was too full of bindings and chains, both physical and insidiously invisible, those chains that have me serving you the same blood-soaked tea that is poured in the parlors of the wives of the British navy. I became a pirate to save myself. With the power that is on this island, I could save so many more!”  
  
“These powers aren’t safe,” Pitch says, watching her closely. “You don’t have the power over it that you think you do. It won’t want to be at your beck and call, even to destroy the kinds of things it hates. The only way to protect yourself and your crew is to find a way to break the bargain and have it forget you entirely, or to learn how to bind it again after it’s released.”  
  
“I care about the safety of my crew above all else,” Tooth says, then pauses. She looks directly at Pitch. “I could never betray the power in the ways you said. Even seeking out the means would go directly against my goals. That is more…something _your_ hatred of such powers would lead you to do. Which, naturally, would be foolish, since if the power on this island was free, I have no doubt it would have the power to free your daughter.”  
  
Pitch nods slowly. “I understand what you’re saying.” Oh, yes, he understands it far too well. Tooth is smart enough to want out, but can’t look for a way on her own. Pitch can look for a way to thwart the power she’s meddled with, as long as he doesn’t pick up any coins and become part of the island power’s bargain. And Pitch would do this because the island power might indeed be able to free his child. “I still think what you’re doing is incredibly dangerous.”  
  
“Hah! You can’t be more frightened of this than you are of the things you’ve already seen on the sea,” Tooth says. She folds her arms. “You have heard what I have to say. I have other work to attend to. I will send someone with food. I know at nightfall you will be able to escape your bonds. Come to me or sail away, then.” She stands and goes to the door, then turns back to Pitch for a moment. “I really, truly think the power here could free your daughter,” she says quietly, then leaves.

* * *

Pitch pushes through heavy foliage into the room of the ruined palace where Tooth and her crew are planning their next tooth-harvesting foray. Tooth glances up at him, then stands slowly to face him. She looks him up and down, the hint of a smile on her lips. Now that the sun has set, Pitch’s garments are no longer rags, but the finest accoutrements that any dandy pirate might dream of, save that they’re all in black. Lamplight sparks off the jet buttons and beads on his magnificent coat, and Tooth only notes the intricate embroidery on it before shifting her gaze. It had seemed to be moving, and given Pitch’s powers, she knows she shouldn’t look too closely.  
  
“That’s a good look for you,” she says mildly.  
  
Pitch bows and smiles enough to bare his teeth, which prove noticeably sharper-looking than they had earlier. “Almost as good as your jewelry,” he says. “Now. How many more beads must we add to your necklaces?”

**Author's Note:**

> Comments from Tumblr:
> 
> sylphidine said: Perfect for Talk Like A Pirate Day.


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